Milonga, Tango

Another tango milestone: surviving (and even enjoying!) my first birthday vals

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There’s a delightful tradition in tango that, on your birthday, you get the dance floor to yourself for a vals, with a succession of partners coming to dance with you for perhaps 20-30 seconds each. This means you get to dance with maybe seven or eight followers in the course of the song, and have the entire floor to use as you please.

Of course, the downside to this is that you also get an entire milonga-ful of dancers as audience!

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Progress update, Tango, Theory

A systematic plan for expanding my core vocabulary

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While my longer-term goal is truly improvised dance, I am of course mostly dependent on figures for now.

But the two are in any case very closely linked: the more of my existing figures I can call upon in dance, the more experience I’m getting of different movement possibilities …

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Milonga, Tango

Tango Terra was heaven again, even with overly-tight new shoes

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Tango Terra.jpg

After yesterday’s work, it was time for the week’s second instalment of Tango Terra fun.

My new shoes, an Xmas present from Steph, had finally arrived. The good news was that they were absolutely gorgeous. The bad news was that they were far too tight ….

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Private lesson, Tango

A private that was hard work for all the right reasons

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There’s bad news and good news with pure technique lessons. The bad news is that, because you’re always working with the fundamentals, it can feel like: what, this again/still? And today’s lesson was working on basics:

  • Pushing into the floor from the standing leg
  • Reaching for the floor with the free leg
  • Keeping the core engaged during the step

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Tango, Theory

One further thought on following: chests …

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chests.jpg

I’ve written a number of times about the problems with sequence-based lessons.

The bottom-line of most beginner and improver group lessons is that both leaders and followers alike are taught steps. Each knows what they are supposed to do, so there’s no real need to lead a figure (only to do enough to identify it to the follower), and no real need to follow (because the follower knows what’s coming) …

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Group class, Milonga, Tango

A fabulous lesson as always, and some (likely explicable) magic at Tango Terra

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magic.jpg

Things have been pretty non-stop of late, and I did briefly consider skipping the class to just go to the milonga – but I’m so glad I didn’t! 

The Thursday intermediate class is always excellent, and tonight we started with what had to be the most ironic exercise ever for me …

Continue reading A fabulous lesson as always, and some (likely explicable) magic at Tango Terra →

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